Is Obamacare still the point?

Suddenly, even as everyone in Washington focuses on the government shutdown and debt ceiling standoff, fewer than ever want to talk about the issue that launched those fights in the first place: Obamacare.

President Barack Obama and his aides are painting GOP leaders as hostage takers and suicide bombers over their shutdown and debt ceiling strategy. House Republicans are pushing the idea that Obama and Democrats are intransigents who refuse to engage in civil discourse on a solution. Senate Democrats are hammering Speaker Boehner with the president’s call for a House vote on a clean funding bill. And everyone wants to talk about how shutdown pain is hitting home for ordinary Americans.

Obama defends ACA glitches

Of course, for many congressional Republicans, the health care law hasn’t disappeared, even if it has shifted to the back burner. House Speaker John Boehner continues to channel his most conservative members, saying on Sunday that it’s “time for us to stand and fight” against the law on ABC’s “This Week.”

And the Obama administration’s ambitious outreach plan to register the uninsured keeps progressing, provided the targets can get access to the appropriate website.

But it’s easy to see why Obamacare has become, for both parties, the issue that dare not speak its name. The White House would prefer to not deal with questions about a messy rollout that led to a week’s worth of headlines about rickety websites. Republicans, wary of being blamed for the shutdown and being tagged with conservative ringleader Ted Cruz, want to make the central issue Obama’s refusal to negotiate.

For his part, Obama — who has made public remarks pegged to this fall’s fiscal fights on seven of the last eight days — hasn’t made extensive remarks about health care since touting the exchanges’ Day One debut in the Rose Garden Oct. 1. Since then, the health care program has been plagued with rollout troubles, with the signup websites crumbling under the strain of heavy traffic and waves of technical glitches.

Even Obama’s campaign arm, Organizing for Action, is up with a TV ad to run on CNN and MSNBC about how the shutdown is “hurting veterans, seniors and our kids,” urging supporters to “tell them to stand up to the Tea Party,” as a photo of Boehner and Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-Va.) flashed on the screen — but no defense or celebration of the signature Obama policy driving the dispute.

Every one of Obama’s public appearances since Oct. 1 — including comments made during interviews with CNBC and the Associated Press, at a Maryland construction company, on a rare sandwich outing, and an event Monday at the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s headquarters — has centered on the idea that Republicans are hurting the country by shutting down the government and playing chicken with default.

“The government is still shut down, services are still interrupted, and hundreds of thousands of hardworking public servants, including many FEMA professionals, are still furloughed without pay, or they’re not allowed to work at all,” Obama said Monday during his trip to FEMA, one of several ways his administration has looked to focus the spotlight on how worker furloughs are hampering disaster preparation and response.

During his 11 minutes of remarks Monday at FEMA headquarters, Obama made only one offhand reference to health care, in a list of issues on which he’s willing to negotiate with Republicans once the government is running again and Congress increases the debt limit.

It isn’t just a presidential predilection. A new bipartisan congressional aversion to Obamacare mentions was evident late last week at the Capitol, when both House Republicans and Senate Democrats held splashy press events without mentioning the Affordable Care Act.

Cantor talked about opening D.C.-area national parks. Sen. Mary Landrieu (D-La.) appeared before a dozen small business owners impacted by the shutdown. Sen. Debbie Stabenow (D-Mich.) gathered physicians to highlight shutdown cuts to the National Institutes of Health, which House Republicans had offered to fund in a one-off spending bill. And just a short distance away, a parade of Republican members appeared at the World War II memorial, where total access had initially fallen victim to the furloughs of Park Service personnel.

In none of those events was Obamacare discussed.

“We already voted to defund it 42 times,” Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R-Utah) said Monday. “There’s only so many times you can point out a website that doesn’t work.”